There’s freedom in being over 40. (Well, maybe in spirit rather than in body.)
Finally, you know stuff. Stuff they could never teach you in high school. Maybe you have kids or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re married, or not, or was. Whatever the situation, people over 40 have had to learn through different experiences and have (we hope!) more wisdom about issues than when we were teens. No matter what your teen status, adult life has delivered a level playing field.
I left my teen years behind, quicker than Speedy Gonzales (now, THAT’S showing my age). Painfully shy and a bit of a nerd, school for me was a place of fear, uncertainty and longing. Fear of doing the wrong thing, uncertainty of who I really was and a longing to be appreciated and accepted for me, even if I didn’t think very highly of myself at the time. As soon as that final exam was over, I was planning a new life, a new destiny in a new city, in the hope of leaving all the angst behind.
But insecurities have this annoying little habit of following.
Twenty years on and married with three children (thankfully nothing like the TV series of the same name), I now appear to be a confident woman with some wisdom about life. I have spoken to a crowd, sung in front of a congregation and given a eulogy or three in my time. But it has been a twenty year process. Little by little, one decision before another, I am winning the war, though the insecurities have been a constant battle ever since the school days.
Which is why a random Facebook invitation to ‘catch up’ with a school crowd I haven’t seen in ten years, or in some cases twenty, left me a little unravelled.
Do I go? Do they want me to go? But I wasn’t in the ‘cool’ crowd. But I was invited so maybe I should go? Who else is going? What if I have no one to talk to…? Yada, yada, yada. I couldn’t believe the schoolyard emotions could still be there after all these years.
These questions were followed by my own rebuke: “What are you, 16? Pull yourself together, woman!” – said out loud, because we old ladies do that sometimes.
And then I got to thinking…why? Why did those emotions resurface? Why did it bother me?
After some soul searching, I think it’s this – in the teenage years, when adulthood is emerging, classmates are there. Whether you liked them or not, they were the first friends, the first foes, the first crushes (and there were plenty of those), and maybe the first kiss. They are the first people to see your new adult self and for some reason, whether I admitted it or not, I cared what they thought.
Against my fears (which involved me saying yes, then no, then yes, then maybe) I met up with the school crowd...and it was the best thing I ever did. In some ways, it was like time hadn’t passed and we had the familiarity of a bunch of kids who grew up together. Even though, we spent very little time associating at school and many years have passed since. All of us now have the wisdom to see the person behind that unfortunate label we gave each other back in the day. This time, there were no cliques, no ‘cool’ groups, no nerds (yee-ha!) – just a group of people catching up on the last two decades.
If only I knew then what I know now….
I can’t go back and change time (wouldn’t we all, if we could?), but it did get me thinking about what this middle-aged lady (gasp, did I really just use that term to describe myself???) would tell her teenage self. Or more so, her teenage children….
- Acknowledge your strengths and be proud of who you are: a work in progress. And that’s okay.
- Learn how to laugh – but make sure it’s with others and at yourself, not the other way around.
- Everyone has a story, just some choose not to show it. Don't judge just on what you see.
- In twenty years, you are going to be having a beer with people you don’t speak to now…and it'll be fun.
- In twenty years, you'll all be laughing about who was actually in the 'cool' group - we all thought everyone else was!
- Most of all, believe that childhood friends are unique and indescribable. Treasure these friendships and they will last a lifetime.
